Park City, Jan 27: Last year`s big road-trip tale at the Sundance Film Festival was greeted with guffaws. This year`s has met with sobs.

Both "Little Miss Sunshine" from last year and the current Sundance entry "Grace Is Gone" are highway heartbreakers, "Sunshine" showing a family that comes together through hilarious adversity, "Grace" depicting a family shattered by the cruelest of tragedies.

Starring John Cusack, "Grace" tells the story of a stern, loving but emotionally distant father who learns his wife, an Army sergeant, has been killed in Iraq. Unable to tell his two young daughters, he takes them on a trip to an amusement park, buying a few days before he has to break the news.

First-time director James C. Strouse`s script came Cusack`s way at just the right moment. Angry that the Bush administration had banned media footage of coffins coming home bearing soldiers killed in Iraq, Cusack had been looking to tell the story behind one of those coffins.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases. In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the military-wide policy actually dates from about November 2000 -- the last days of the Clinton administration -- but it apparently went unheeded and unenforced, as images of caskets returning from the Afghanistan war appeared on television broadcasts and in newspapers until early this year. Though Dover Air Force Base, which has the military's largest mortuary, has had restrictions for 12 years, others "may not have been familiar with the policy," the spokeswoman said. This year, "we've really tried to enforce it." President Bush's opponents say he is trying to keep the spotlight off the fatalities in Iraq. "This administration manipulates information and takes great care to manage events, and sometimes that goes too far," said Joe Lockhart, who as White House press secretary joined President Bill Clinton at several ceremonies for returning remains. "For them to sit there and make a political decision because this hurts them politically -- I'm outraged."

First-time director James C. Strouse`s script came Cusack`s way at just the right moment. Angry that the Bush administration had banned media footage of coffins coming home bearing soldiers killed in Iraq, Cusack had been looking to tell the story behind one of those coffins.

"I thought it was the most brazen, cowardly, egregious political act I`d seen in my lifetime," Cusack said in an interview. "Do you think that`s going to stop anything? Do you think if you don`t show the coffins we won`t find out?"

You are a young man, John, and you're an actor. So I'll give you a pass for failing to understand that in the years since World War II -- when news reporters were Americans first and muckraking crusaders second -- media reports accompanied by coffins draped in the Stars and Stripes have progressively (pun intended) conducted a testiculectomy on the armed forces.

It's been a pretty good political move by the big three news organizations to stop showing the images of the World Trade Center getting hit by Islamist terrorists flying jets. How well has that worked? Just yesterday, we've got a guy writing in one of America's biggest newspapers that the nation has 'overreacted' to the killing of 3,000+ civilians in what would under reasonable circumstances would be called "peacetime." Don't think the news honchos don't understand the power of their images; each one of them (save Roger Ailes) was looking for their first opportunity to play Walter Cronkite and stick a dagger in the war effort if they deemed it too bloody for their sensibilities. The White House understood that, and were borne out in 2002 by ABC News' in-your-face use of the coffin photos. They accompanied Ted Koppel's recitation of the names of the War on Terror's fallen and the display of their faces. It also was ABC News' David Westin who was first among the big three TV news chiefs to announce an embargo on showing video of the 9/11 attack.

Think, John -- when was the last time you saw it? (The movies Fahrenheit 9/11 and World Trade Center don't count).

We know of the violence of Sherman's march through the Confederacy through the letters and diaries of the survivors, but if CNN had been around, showing every devastated plantation owner hours after the path of destruction, the CSA would probably still be with us -- who knows when slavery would have been banned. (Don't put that past CNN; remember that we learned after Saddam's fall the full knowledge of his greatest atrocities.) The stakes are higher this time, and it's likely we won't know for many years just how high.

The United States of America as we know it isn't going to last forever -- no empire does, from that of the Egyptian Pharoahs to Alexander's Greece to the Caesars' Rome to the British grip on far-flung nations many times over its size and population. The question every President since the early 20th Century had to ask himself (or in the case of Jimmy Carter, should have) was, "Am I going to be the one that 'lost' America? When history is written a century (or longer) from now, and tourists visit the ruins of Washington, D.C., will my time in the White House be cited as the turning point that ended the American dream once and for all?"

Listening to likes of your pals Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, it seems they think if the USA isn't the benevolent bit-player on the world scene they think it should be, it might as well slip away, faithfully believing its power vacuum filled by people who know how to put a viable one-world co-operative in motion. What they don't seem to realize is that America's biggest enemies aren't revulsed by the sight of their countrymen in flag-draped coffins, they delight in it. They don't avoid confrontation when negotiation is a possibility, they hold out hope of negotiation to provide enough time to reload. They don't whisper among themselves plans for genocide, they announce it loudly, certain in their ability to extinguish a nationality if only they are ruthless enough. And the rest of the world cowers from them even with the United States' opposition.

Remember, Gandhi's victory of nonviolence occurred mostly because of the relative decency of his main enemy, the British Crown. When the UK abandoned India to its own devices, its sole enemy became the restless Muslim minority. Gandhi found out what history later taught people who are paying attention; nonviolence doesn't work against Islamists. So now we have Pakistan, thought by many to be an eventual nuclear power, and the presumed refuge of Osama bin Laden.

To answer your shallow questions, "Do you think that`s going to stop anything? Do you think if you don`t show the coffins we won`t find out?" The answers are "no, they don't," and "no, they didn't." But "they" are the ones charged with doing what it takes to win, on the front lines and at home. "They" understand that in modern times, war is not fought only on the battlefields, it is fought in the media. And now, with the coffins above the fold in the morning MSM rag you read over your toast and coffee in the morning, America is coming ever so close to conceding defeat in Iraq (for all intents and purposes) despite having fought "longer than in World War II" yet having lost fewer soldiers than in some individual battles in Southeast Asia.

So now we have Pakistan, thought by many to be an eventual nuclear power, and the presumed refuge of Osama bin Laden. --- No problem with the main thrust of what you wrote, but Pakistan has been a nuclear power for about eight years.

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